The issue here is whether parents should have control over the lives of their own children.

In Japan, parents do everything they can to ensure that their children catch all the usual childhood diseases. The resulting immunity is better than what vaccines provide. Japan is an advanced industrial nation, and I presume that Japanese parents love their children too.

According to the article: "They are free to continue believing vaccines are harmful, even as the entire medical and scientific communities try in vain to tell them otherwise. But they should not be free to endanger the lives of everyone else with their views."

That says that I should be required to inject myself with vaccines which I consider harmful. How goofy is that? With a few minutes searching the internet you'll see that there's plenty of doctors and researchers who consider vaccines dubious at best, especially for children.

Get used to it. Requiring everyone to be injected so you might maybe be safer? That's a No Go. Adding insult to injury, those injections contain known poisons, are of questionable effectiveness, and there exists a substantial body of evidence pointing to collateral damage such as autism.

AFAIK all the information released by Snowden is about official NSA programs that have been approved by legions of higher-ups. It is obviously a loser to go to one of those higher-ups to claim that such a program is illegal. Whistleblowing within the organization only makes sense when it involves actions by some rogue person(s) that goes against organization policy. Telling your boss that what he does is illegal, will just get you into trouble.

I look at job descriptions from all over the world, and it's the same everywhere. For short-term contracting gigs, it usually makes sense. For a permanent employee, it doesn't. Smarter would be to simply describe the tasks of the position, and let the candidates figure out for themselves if they can hack it. Problem is, this basically means that HR can't even pretend to contribute anything meaningful to the process. Ergo, it won't happen.

1) Some new naval warship on its shakedown cruise had to be towed back to San Diego because its Microsoft OS bluescreened.

2) When NASA's shuttle engines were being tested, two of them blew up on the test stand. Some programmer neglected to factor in the fact that a large butterfly valve takes time to close. He issued the command to start closing at the time it should have been completely closed, and boom!, no more engine.

"For the past 30 years every Republican president has increased the debt while every Democrat has decreased it."

Sounds good, but a closer look at the cited page shows that in the last 30 years there has only been one Democratic president, and we all know Clinton was just lucky to have presided over the superbubble. Furthermore, for six of his eight years both the House and Senate had Republican majorities. Remember, the President cannot spend a dime -- only Congress can do that.

Going back to the beginning of the table in 1945, the results are more mixed.

The only thing you have to know is that the manufacturers purposely make it difficult to refill their cartridges. This proves that their ink is simply way overpriced, and all the marketing hot air in the world will not explain away that fact.

I recently built a trivial database application using Base. I stumbled over more bugs than you can shake a stick at, especially with report builder. Despite the bugs, report builder is still better than the catatonic alternative. And no matter how I screw up my SQL, I always get the same, utterly unhelpful, error message. If OO were anywhere close to being done experienced people wouldn't have to redesign simple projects to work around bugs.